Alan Smithee wrote:So I saw The Dance of Reality this week. I would say that I was pleasantly surprised by it. Most of the reviews I've read are fairly accurate with the Fellini comparisons. It's still very out there but less stream of consciousness. It's an autobiography told in a way that allows Jodorowsky to make his family what he wishes they had been. So in that way it's surprisingly moving..

I've seen it now, too, and while I can see where the Fellini comparisons come from, I'd still say the circus aspects and the 'freaks' come entirely from Jodorowsky's world. While I don't know anything about Jodorowsky's family story, this strikes me as a very compassionate film, perhaps even idealising the father a bit too much while nevertheless showing his cruelty and sadistic streaks before he undergoes his transformation. The best part of the film is the first third, mainly concentrating on the boy Alejandro and his spriritual loneliness and then what amounts to some sort of 'awakening'. This part has so many different levels and esoteric undercurrents that other directors would have made a whole three hour film of it. Somewhat unfortunately, the film becomes a bit more conventional later on when it largely follows the story of the father; I thought that the story of young Alejandro was far more interesting. In any case, I really found the moments in which the old Jodorowsky appears himself as a sort of guide to his younger self deeply touching, and not at all self-regarding like it might have been in lesser hands. And the whole film of course is filled with visualisations and expressions of Jodorowsky's arcane philosophy, but thankfully it never becomes preachy.

Not his greatest film, but a visual treat in any case, and a mature work thankfully without any obvious shock effects, and perhaps in some way a summing-up of his work and thinking. In this respect it may be comparable to Cocteau's "Testament d'Orphée". But I really hope this won't be his last film; he simply looks too lively in this film, and I think he might have some more to say.

Jodo is starting a Kickstarter for his new film, Endless Poetry, on Sunday, 2/15, and is doing a live introduction of the project here on that day. Endless Poetry is to be a follow-up to The Dance of Reality, this time focusing on his young adulthood as a Chilean poet.

The Dance of Reality was fascinating, kind of an anti-rose tinted view of childhood crossed with a comedy and a musical! There felt like an El Topo kind of structure to the film of a threatening masculine prescence having his impassive facade shattered by going through a crisis, eventually losing himself and getting adopted by various other groups or causes roaming the lands (including a religious group), before in a roundabout way coming back to himself. I wondered whether this was building on themes from Jodorowsky's previous films or, given that this is an autobiographical piece based on his upbringing and his father, could this be seen as illustrating the ur-text from which the preoccupations in his other films sprung from? Or is it a bit of both? Using imagery discovered over his career in order to tackle this material, and working on a subject of his early life that makes more sense when approached as an older man facing death looking back on how his life was guided early on?

There feels like a constant theme of loss and things being taken from our main character (at first the boy, later his father) that suggests even from the moment of childhood we are living in a constant battle of life against death and the bigger forces that shape our lives. Perhaps that is just a fact of life, like death itself, and without that constant loss there would be no chance for nostalgia and memory. It is interesting though that while the boy and the father lose many things throughout the course of the film (the hair, the use of the hands and so on), at least the mother never loses her operatic voice. It would seem that there would truly be a crisis if that occurred, but she, and her great pair of lungs, is able to keep pulling her family back together in the worst times, despite having very Umbrellas of Cherbourg-esque lamenting scenes or a moment in which she eye-poppingly performs a miracle that outdoes Nicole Kidman's big scene from The Paperboy!

But it is also extremely bizarre and blackly comic throughout. I'm torn between my favourite scene being the one in which Alejandro gives his expensive new red shoes to the local indigenous shoeshine boy, who delightedly dances off in his own musical number reverie! Only for it to turn out that the red shoes, Hans Christian Andersen-style, danced the boy straight off the slippery rocks into the sea and drowned him! Or the moment of the attempted assassination of the country's leader taking place at a dog fancy dress show! With both a price for the 'best dressed' dog ("the butterfly dog!") and the 'worst dressed' one ("the kangaroo dog", with a chorus of boos accompanying the forlorn dog's walk up to the podium, while it trips over its fabric kangaroo tail!), with the failed assassin declaring solemnly, and with hilarious straight-faced philosophical, political and metaphorical symbolism, that "I don't want to live any more in a world where people dress dogs up in costumes" before he shoots himself! In front of the string quartet of nuns no less!

There is also a rather interesting moment during the late scenes in which the father Jaime is brutally tortured in which all of the torturers are dressed in black suits like characters from Reservoir Dogs! According to the interviews on the disc, this was apparently Jodorowsky's way of alluding to alleged CIA involvement in the torture of political prisoners in Chile.

pzadvance wrote:I thought it was a very fun "what-if" movie, but the interviews were a little too one-sided for me. Everyone involved is just fawning over this project in the most hyperbolic terms imaginable, then wildly speculating as to the potential impact it might have left on the industry. The truth of the matter is it's easy to idealize a project like this that never even got in front of the cameras--just looking at all the potentially volatile ingredients, any number of factors could have coalesced during production and post that would have prevented this from being the lost masterpiece everybody in the film expected it to be. It's highly likely it would have come out the other end just as compromised and half-realized as Lynch's Dune. Who's to say?

It seemed to me that Jodorowsky and his producers were incredibly naive when it came to dealing with how to deal with that knotty problem that is Hollywood, with regards to everything except the book which laid out the ideas with seemingly incredible detail. It's actually quite understandable how the studios (even in the supposedly more open 1970's) would balk at investing in someone who was only known for very arty films with little to no commercial sensibility.

I'd actually like it if they spent more talking about the book, and who ended up with it, because it's undeniable that some of the visual ideas expressed would wind up in major movies later on. And maybe if they actually got someone from the Pink Floyd camp talking about their conversations with Jodorowsky.

I assumed that Jodorowsky's The Dance of Reality would have had its own thread, or Jodorowsky himself, but not according to the search function, so I'll briefly comment on Endless Poetry here. It's the continuation of The Dance of Reality and just as bloated, narcissistic and ridiculous, but at least it's entertainingly insane, so if you were a fan of the first film, you'll lap this up. Random absurdities abound (a nazi on stilts adorns the edge of a crowd scene, a flasher has a chicken-head cock; characters collapse face-first into sponge cakes in response to a family tragedy; a giant floating head of Your Dad shouting "faggot!" when you write a line of verse), dwarves and Mexican wrestlers swarm about, black-swathed bunraku stagehands supply and remove props, the auteur / protagonist repeatedly protests / demonstrates that he's "not a faggot" amidst a big seething mess of peculiar (and peculiarly old-fashioned) homophobia: just another day at Jodorowsky Central. The emblematic scene (spoiler, I guess?) is when Jodorowsky ends up as a (mediocre) circus clown, but halts his act to deliver a personal monologue that climaxes with his declaration "I'm not really a clown; I'm a POET!" Cue rapturous applause from thousands of delighted circusgoers, Jodorowsky stripping naked, crowdsurfing. And that's not even remotely the silliest scene. Oh, and you want the perfect response to any unwanted pick-up line? How about: "I am saving my hymen for a man with a holy forehead who will descend from the mountains"? They never stopped making bad movies, but only Jodorowsky makes bad movies like this.

I thought there must have been a dedicated thread, but I checked again and searching for "Jodorowsky" in "Topic Titles" still comes up with no matches. Has the search function on this board ever worked properly?

The Narrator Returns wrote:How's Christopher Doyle's work on Endless Poetry? The idea of the any of the things zedz described being shot by Doyle is making me very eager to see this.

Pretty anonymous, actually. Looked an awful lot like The Dance of Reality (perhaps even less flashy), and I was frankly surprised to see his credit at the end of the film. It's a far cry from cinematographer-as-auteur films like Motel Cactus, but it's very nicely shot nevertheless.

zedz wrote:I assumed that Jodorowsky's The Dance of Reality would have had its own thread, or Jodorowsky himself, but not according to the search function, so I'll briefly comment on Endless Poetry here. It's the continuation of The Dance of Reality and just as bloated, narcissistic and ridiculous, but at least it's entertainingly insane, so if you were a fan of the first film, you'll lap this up. Random absurdities abound (a nazi on stilts adorns the edge of a crowd scene, a flasher has a chicken-head cock; characters collapse face-first into sponge cakes in response to a family tragedy; a giant floating head of Your Dad shouting "faggot!" when you write a line of verse), dwarves and Mexican wrestlers swarm about, black-swathed bunraku stagehands supply and remove props, the auteur / protagonist repeatedly protests / demonstrates that he's "not a faggot" amidst a big seething mess of peculiar (and peculiarly old-fashioned) homophobia: just another day at Jodorowsky Central. The emblematic scene (spoiler, I guess?) is when Jodorowsky ends up as a (mediocre) circus clown, but halts his act to deliver a personal monologue that climaxes with his declaration "I'm not really a clown; I'm a POET!" Cue rapturous applause from thousands of delighted circusgoers, Jodorowsky stripping naked, crowdsurfing. And that's not even remotely the silliest scene. Oh, and you want the perfect response to any unwanted pick-up line? How about: "I am saving my hymen for a man with a holy forehead who will descend from the mountains"? They never stopped making bad movies, but only Jodorowsky makes bad movies like this.

I actually like Dance of Reality a whole lot, but this was not good. The silliness and absurdity are actually pretty boring and straightforward in the context of the Chilean and Mexican theater that Jodorowsky has spent a career cribbing from. The biggest problem of the film though is that AJ is a pretty dull character and discovering the '50s/ '60s experimental art scene is probably the most boring thing possible.

It is funny to hear Standing Cheek to Cheek here (during a sex scene with a dwarf who has the same legs as Arquette in Crash) after also hearing it in Boss Baby which of course is about as opposite a film as could be imagined.